Supplier independent feature modelling
Herman Hartmann, Tim Trew, Aart Matsinger · Software Product Lines · 2009
The growing use of Software Supply Chains results in an increasing proportion of the functionality of a software product line (SPL) being determined by functionality of suppliers. In order to cover the whole product line, it is sometimes necessary to use several suppliers, offering partly the same functionality. This leads to overlapping feature models.This paper introduces a Supplier Independent Feature Model (SIFM). Through dependency relations between the SIFM and the feature models of the individual suppliers, the variability of the combined components is modelled. In this way the complexity of merging feature models is avoided and the relations with the development artefacts are maintained.The creation of an SIFM is elaborated through an example and a case study. These show that this is a straightforward process, and show that the SIFM facilitates the generation of product variants in an efficient manner.